


Be My Place of Rest

by mimsyborogove



Category: The Dark Artifices Series - Cassandra Clare, The Eldest Curses Series - Cassandra Clare, The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare
Genre: F/M, Friends to Lovers, Post TDA
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:13:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26560462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimsyborogove/pseuds/mimsyborogove
Summary: The sky was heavy with gray clouds, the slight electrical charge in the air signaling a storm on the horizon.“This doesn’t look ominous at all,” Ragnor grumbled as he stepped out of the Portal behind Catarina, taking in the sight of the decrepit mountain castle the Shadowhunters called the Scholomance. A bolt of lightning flashed in the dark storm clouds that were rapidly approaching behind the castle. “Like a damn horror movie,” he muttered under his breath.“I would say it looks more cheerful on the inside, but it really doesn’t,” Catarina replied. “There isn’t nearly as much mold, and far fewer vermin than the old Academy though,” she added helpfully. The wind picked up and she shivered in the cold October air. “The climate is too harsh to support them.”“Wonderful,” Ragnor sighed, readjusting his grip on his bags as they made their way to the front door.
Relationships: Magnus Bane & Ragnor Fell & Catarina Loss, Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood (background), Ragnor Fell/Catarina Loss
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Be My Place of Rest

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Carbon Leaf’s _All of My Love_.
> 
> Discworld quote is from Terry Pratchett’s _Soul Music_.

The sky was heavy with gray clouds, the slight electrical charge in the air signaling a storm on the horizon. 

“This doesn’t look ominous at all,” Ragnor grumbled as he stepped out of the Portal behind Catarina, taking in the sight of the decrepit mountain castle the Shadowhunters called the Scholomance. A bolt of lightning flashed in the dark storm clouds that were rapidly approaching behind the castle. “Like a damn horror movie,” he muttered under his breath.

“I would say it looks more cheerful on the inside, but it really doesn’t,” Catarina replied. “There isn’t nearly as much mold, and far fewer vermin than the old Academy though,” she added helpfully. The wind picked up and she shivered in the cold October air. “The climate is too harsh to support them.”

“Wonderful,” Ragnor sighed, readjusting his grip on his bags as they made their way to the front door. 

Ragnor had visited the Scholomance occasionally—long ago, before it had closed down when the first Accords had been signed—but Catarina had been lecturing part time here for the past couple of years, so she was more familiar with its current, somewhat decrepit, state. She led Ragnor around a few less safe corridors and toward the residential wing where she already had a bedroom set up for the times she stayed overnight. Catarina still intended to keep her teaching part time, but Ragnor was planning to move in full time, like he had once lived at the Academy.

She dropped her small backpack of clothes off in her room, then joined Ragnor in the room across the hall that he had claimed for himself. She found him standing in the middle of the room with his arms crossed, scowling at the bare furniture. “Why are Shadowhunters so allergic to comfort?” he asked, poking the hard mattress on the small bed to make his point.

Catarina shrugged. Her room was just a place to grade papers and to sleep at night, so it had never really bothered her. She’d had worse living spaces over the centuries.

Ragnor spent the next half hour grumbling to himself and magically replacing everything in the room with more comfortable alternatives. A larger bed with a softer mattress, topped with a thick green quilt. Plush carpets to cover the cold stone floor. Rich velvet curtains for the windows, and an oak desk with a green leather inlay like the one he used to have at the Academy, as well as a more modern cushioned desk chair to sit in. 

Catarina sat down on the end of his new bed and watched in amusement as he worked. “No stuffed warlock heads this time at least,” she heard him mutter once or twice as he conjured his new furniture.

Only a few of his personal touches had been left in his room at the Academy when she had moved there, and most of that had been well gnawed by the rats by then. It was nice to see what the room should have looked like if he had been the one able to go back there to teach after the Academy had reopened, this strange mixture of Ragnor’s familiar decorating style shoved into a Nephilim setting.

A flash of light out of the window caught Catarina’s eye. “That looks like another Portal,” she said. “If you’re done decorating, we should go meet them in the library.”

She and Ragnor had agreed to come to the Scholomance early in order to help overhaul the library before new students arrived. Because the Cohort had taken a such strong root among the Centurions, one of the first topics of conversation between the new Clave headed by Alec Lightwood-Bane and the Downworlder Alliance had been about how to prevent it from ever happening again. 

After much discussion, they decided to start by carefully weeding through the books in the libraries that the Shadowhunters were getting their information from. It wasn’t just the Scholomance; Institutes around the world were working with their local Downworld groups in their own libraries, and the Shadowhunter Academy was starting over from scratch outside of Idris, overseen by Lucian Graymark, who was already screening every tome allowed in. Books containing false or prejudiced information on Downworlders would be marked and separated from the main libraries, only accessible to those studying them in a historical context of terrible things the Nephilim had once believed in.

Catarina and Ragnor had volunteered to come to help at the Scholomance—along with Jia and Patrick Penhallow, who would be running the school, a small group of other Downworlders, and even couple of the older Centurions who hadn’t been drawn in by the Cohort—rather than stay in New York with Magnus to deal with the New York Institute’s library. 

She and Ragnor had sat in Magnus’s living room after the meeting, discussing the changes they were hoping to see in the Shadow World while Magnus’s children sat on the floor building some kind of model Ragnor had given them. She gave it two days tops before Magnus called Ragnor to complain about losing pieces of the toy in the carpet and stepping on them in the middle of the night. 

“Are you sure you’ll have enough help?” Magnus had asked them. “The Scholomance library is enormous.”

Catarina had heard the conflict in his voice. She knew part of him felt guilty for not offering to go with them and taking advantage of the fact that the three of them were together again. But Magnus’s life had changed enormously between Ragnor’s disappearance and his official return.

Ragnor had shrugged. “I’m sure there’s plenty of poison in the New York Institute to keep you busy.”

“We have more Downworlder volunteers to tackle the library here though,” Magnus said.

Catarina had reached over to ruffle Magnus’s hair, ruining his careful styling. “We’ll be fine. Don’t feel guilty about staying here with your husband.”

Those had been the magic words to change Magnus’s mood. Any reminder that he was officially a married man made his face go all soft and dreamy. It always made Catarina’s own heart warm to see her friend so happy and loved.

It would have been nice to have his help though, Catarina thought as she pulled down more books from the dusty shelves. They ended up with less than ten volunteers, and it was dreary work paging through old tomes to separate the accurate from the inaccurate. The piles of inaccurate and only partially accurate books were frighteningly large, which shouldn’t have surprised her as much as it did considering she had lived before the Accords.

The Shadowhunters who had volunteered to help had a decent eye for separating the truth from the lies, but the Downworlders were still frequently interrupted from their own reading to verify some fact or another, which had started wearing on Catarina’s patience after the first dozen or so times.

Catarina emerged from the shelves with a fresh armload of books to find Ragnor scowling down at the book on the table in front of him. 

“You’ll crack your teeth if you keep clenching them like that,” Catarina said, setting the new books down next to him. She laid her hands on his shoulders and ran her thumbs up the back of his neck to the base of his skull to make him relax some of the tension. 

“ _‘Warlocks possess near-human intelligence, but are highly untrustworthy,’_ ” Ragnor read aloud, disgust dripping heavily from every word. _“‘A careful eye must be kept on any warlock officially hired by an Institute to perform magic in order to assure that the creature completes the task they are being compensated for_.’” 

Catarina reached over his shoulder and slammed the book closed before throwing it unceremoniously into the inaccurate pile. “I think we can assume anything else he has to say is entirely useless. It’s pointless to keep reading it just to make yourself mad.”

Ragnor sighed and leaned back against her, tilting his head up so he was looking at her upside down. “Things have to change this time. They’ve gone on like this,” he gestured angrily at the pile of rejected books, “For entirely too long.”

Catarina ran a hand through his hair, making the white curls stick up wildly around his horns. “This is the most hope I’ve ever had that they  _ can _ change,” she said. “They can’t lock themselves in Idris and pretend they’re separate from the rest of the world anymore.”

“ _Most_ of them can’t at least,” Ragnor muttered. He closed his eyes and let her pet his hair for a minute, some of his irritation melting away under her hands, before he huffed another sigh and straightened back up to pull a new book out of the stack and get back to work. 

The hours wore on and rain began to pelt down loudly on the recently repaired glass ceiling of the library as the day grew darker, flashes of lightning illuminating the entire room while thunder rumbled over the mountains. 

They kept working until well after nightfall, with only a brief break for dinner conjured by Ragnor—which the Penhallows tactfully did not question the origin of— when Catarina, ignoring her own advice, got sucked into a horrific book describing the monetary value and magical benefits of warlock marks. The author included helpful instructions on how to surgically remove and preserve various common marks to take as spoils for trophy rooms, along with some extremely graphic illustrations. 

Ragnor closed his own book, tiredly rubbing the bridge of his nose, but moving it to the accurate pile. He glanced at her before reaching for a new book and must have seen something in her expression. He narrowed his eyes and leaned closer to read over her shoulder. 

“You’re going to give yourself nightmares,” he said, sliding the book away from her and tossing it in the inaccurate pile with more force than necessary. 

Catarina rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, like she could rub away the images of skinned and dismembered warlocks, and the centuries old nightmare that one day  _ she _ would be the one caught and put on display in some Institute’s spoils room. 

~*~

That night, Catarina tossed and turned in her narrow bed. Ragnor had been right. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw desecrated corpses that morphed from the illustrations she had seen earlier into the imagined bodies of her friends. Magnus’s eyes, floating disembodied in a jar, the green-gold irises dull and lifeless. Ragnor’s head and hands mounted on a wall like a hunting trophy, his extra-jointed fingers shaped into claws like he was about to attack, the green skin shriveled and mummified, but his horns polished to a high shine. Her own blue skin flayed away from her body and pinned to a board like an entomologist would display a butterfly. 

With a frustrated sigh, Catarina threw her covers off and slipped out of bed. 

Her door creaked loudly as she opened it, and again as she closed it behind her, but there was no one else in the hall to hear. She crossed the corridor and opened Ragnor’s door without knocking. 

Ragnor looked up from where he was sitting in a new armchair he had conjured by the fire, a book in his hands and a pot of tea on the small table beside him. He was wearing the kind of pinstriped pajamas that had become old fashioned when they had blinked and time had slipped by them, his bare feet propped up on a footstool. 

He raised a pale eyebrow at her standing in his doorway, but he didn’t say anything as he waved a wrist in a lazy circle to conjure another armchair for her. Catarina crossed the room and sank down into the chair, curling her legs in close to her. She was well over the fear and avoidance of fires that had come after the time she had nearly been burned at the stake centuries ago, but sometimes she still subconsciously pulled her limbs away, not liking her extremities to be closer to the heat of the blaze than necessary. 

A snap of Ragnor’s fingers summoned another teacup, which he poured a generous amount of brandy into along with the tea, before passing to her. She curved her hands around its warmth and realized she had been shivering. 

Ragnor held up the novel in his hands to show her the well worn cover of a favorite  _ Discworld _ novel they had read together years ago. “A palate cleanser,” he explained, flipping it back open to the page he had marked. They had spent the entire day reading books in the library, but he began to read aloud, the way he often used to by the campfire when they went hiking together. 

Catarina closed her eyes and sipped her tea, letting it warm her up from the inside while the familiar rhythm of Ragnor’s voice washed over her as he read:

“ _‘Death had got rather flustered when he’d created the house. Time and space were things to be manipulated, not obeyed. The internal dimensions had been a little too generous. He’d forgotten to make the outside bigger than the inside._ ’”

She didn’t remember falling asleep, but she recognized the dream when it started. There were always slight variations, but the core of it stayed the same. She had been having this dream more and more often since she had thought Ragnor had been killed, and it had only gotten worse once she had learned he was alive.

This time it started with his arms warm around her, cradling her against him with her head tucked against his neck, where she could smell the faded, familiar scent of his cologne.

She always dreamed of snatches of things that could never be, warm but hazy moments like this giving her just the smallest taste of a reality that could have been if she hadn’t had a secret hanging over her head for the past two centuries like a constant threat. Catarina had seen Shadowhunters kill entire families for the crimes of one person, she couldn’t risk letting that happen to Ragnor if her role in saving Tobias Herondale’s son was ever found out. 

But in dreams they were safe. She could relax with him leaning over her, pressing her into the pillows, almost close enough for her to kiss him. The dim flickering of the enchanted fire softened his features as he looked at her in a tender way he never let most of the world see. 

She wound her arms around his neck and pulled him that little bit closer, brushing her lips against his, waiting for him to disappear from her arms like smoke, the way he always did. 

He made a soft, surprised noise, and then he was kissing her back. In her dream, the firelight blazed brighter, like his control over his magic had slipped a little as his body curved into hers. He tasted like tea and brandy, and his hand was warm as it cupped her cheek before he pulled back suddenly, his dark eyes—nearly black in the firelight—searching hers. 

“Catarina?” he murmured. 

A jolt of panic shot through her. She wasn’t dreaming this time, she realized in sudden horror. 

She must have fallen asleep in the chair by the fire, and Ragnor had been moving her to the bed so she could sleep more comfortably, something he and Magnus had both done for her before when she had dozed off somewhere other than a bed after long shifts at whatever clinic or hospital she was working at at the time. 

And she had kissed him. Oh, God, she had kissed Ragnor with no warning or explanation, and she had no idea what he was thinking now. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I thought I was dreaming.”

He pulled back, far enough to sit up on the edge of the bed, and out of reach of her arms. “Confuse me for someone else?” he asked, with a wry twist to his lips, but his eyes looked hurt. 

Catarina frowned at him and sat up, tucking her legs under her and scooting to the edge of the bed. She reached for his hand, and he let her take it, despite his irritation. She twined her fingers with his, looking down at the tangle of green and blue they made, the extra joints in his fingers curling familiarly against the back of her hand. She had held his hand more times than she could count, but it felt different now, a different thrill fluttering in her stomach at the touch of his skin, overshadowed by a fear that she had done something irreparable to their friendship. “Of course I didn’t confuse you with someone else, you idiot. How could you even think that?”

He gave her a dubious look. “Usually people don’t  _ apologize _ when they kiss the person they meant to.”

“It’s safe to kiss you in dreams,” she murmured, dropping her gaze back down to their hands, blue and green woven together. “It’s never been safe to kiss you for real.”

When she looked up again, his expression was softer, the hurt replaced by surprise. “There were times that I wondered...” He trailed off, then shook his head. “But I always came to the conclusion that I had been mistaken.”

“I’ve always been a danger to you,” she tried to explain. “If I had ever been put on trial for breaking the Accords, they could have had you executed with me. After watching what happened to Eva, I couldn’t risk letting the same thing happen to you. You were safer if you stayed my friend, not my lover.”

Ragnor brushed a gentle thumb over hers. “I would have risked it for you if I had known.”

That may have been true, but Catarina wouldn’t have been able live with the worry. Mundane lovers were safer, even if she knew the pain she would go through losing them. At least she knew they would never be in danger from Shadowhunters, who were sworn to protect them. Even then, she had been too afraid to go through with marrying the only person who had ever asked her, though they had loved each other until his death. 

She thought about all the moments over the decades, where her and Ragnor’s friendship could have changed into something different if she had given him any indication that she was interested in that. She had caught the way Ragnor looked at her sometimes, but he had always been respectful of any boundaries she had laid down, and nothing had ever happened. They were in another of those moments now, but this time she wasn’t sure she could stop it, or if she even wanted to.

Her heart pounded as she reached up to brush her fingertips over Ragnor’s face, tracing the faint lines by his eyes where they crinkled when he smiled, etched onto his face during the happier times of his youth before he had stopped aging somewhere in his thirties, over the curve of his cheekbone, down to the line of his jaw, part of her mind still blaring the familiar alarm: _ this is dangerous, this is dangerous, if the Shadowhunters ever find out what you did, they’ll kill him too.  _

But things were different now. Kit Herondale—the descendant of her Ephraim—had been brought back into the fold. He was now safely living with Tessa and Jem, and Catarina hadn’t been tried and executed for his existence. And as long as Alec Lightwood-Bane was Consul, she wouldn’t be. But she had weathered so many changes in the Shadowhunter government, she knew she couldn’t trust things to stay safe forever. 

But even if things swung back toward the bad, how could they possibly blame Ragnor now? With her secret out in the open, they couldn’t accuse him of knowing and hiding it. She certainly wouldn’t run from her punishment and let him take it in her place if it ever came to that. It may never truly be safe for her, but maybe it wouldn’t be a death sentence for someone to be tied to her now.

“Maybe it was for the best,” Ragnor’s low voice interrupted her thoughts, softer than the rain still falling outside the window, tinged with guilt and sorrow. “I could have brought Sammael down on your head instead of just my own. I  _ still _ could. We all know he’ll be back eventually.”

Ragnor had spent the past two years trying to atone for the sins he committed while he was under Sammael’s control, sins that no one blamed him for except himself. And though it hadn’t erased his guilt—she wasn’t sure Ragnor, who always cared more deeply than he pretended to, would ever be entirely free of that—it had eased the shadows she had seen in his eyes two years ago. Shadows that she saw creeping back now as he thought about what his involvement with a Prince of Hell could mean for their future.

She shifted closer to him, making her decision. She’d lost him once and regretted everything that had been left unsaid between them, every might-have-been that she hadn’t been brave enough to take a chance on, and that she thought she was too late for. She couldn’t let that happen again, not without at least letting him know where she stood. “I’m willing to risk it,” she murmured. “For you.”

Ragnor only hesitated for another second—the shadows of guilt in his eyes at war with the deep longing in his expression—before he cupped her face in both hands and slanted his lips over hers, still gentle, but more insistent than before.

Something inside her shuddered with the softness of it, some part of her soul stretched too thin over too many centuries and too many continents, battered by too many losses for one person to bear. She could almost feel the frayed edges inside of her smoothing as Ragnor stroked her hair back from her face, his clever fingers raising goosebumps over her entire body when they reached the nape of her neck.

It had been so long since she had actually settled anywhere, since she had lived somewhere that was more than a bed to sleep in between hospital shifts or classes she was teaching, but kissing Ragnor felt like coming home. It was fire and comfort and brandy, and a closeness that she didn’t have with anyone else in the world, even Magnus.

She kissed him harder, her hands finding the buttons of his pajama top. He caught her hand before she could undo them, and used the other to tilt her face back up to look at him, his eyes intent on hers again. 

“You’re completely sure?” he asked.

She realized suddenly that Ragnor wasn’t just scared of the danger they could potentially put each other in. He was giving her one last chance to pretend they’d had too much to drink—though they both knew that would be a lie—and said some things they shouldn’t have, and have things go back to normal in the morning before he gave her his heart and the chance of breaking it. She forgot sometimes, how fragile his heart was, and how carefully he guarded it.

“I’m sure,” she said. “Are you?”

He lifted her hand to his lips, and her stomach fluttered as he brushed a feather-light kiss against the back of her fingers, a slight smile turning up the corners of his lips. “I’ve always been sure of you.”

She pulled him down into another kiss, losing herself in the feel of his mouth hot against hers, his hands drawing lines of electricity up her spine where they slid under her oversized pajama sweatshirt while she tried to show him how much she wanted him, how dear he was to her, even if she hadn’t been able to tell him before now.

She pressed a kiss against his cheek, and another at the edge of his jaw. Behind his ear. Against his neck, where she left a mark, a dark emerald compared to the rest of him. She reached for the top button on his pajamas again, and this time he didn’t stop her. She undid the button and kissed the skin it revealed. Another button, another kiss. 

Ragnor looped an arm around her waist, pulling her completely into his lap, and she shifted until her legs were comfortably straddling his hips.

She made quick work of the rest of the buttons and pushed the shirt off his broad shoulders, helping him shrug it off. Her fingers lingered for a moment over the smooth, unmarked skin where she knew there had been three stab wounds carved into his chest, but she pushed the thought away. She had been lost in too many old memories for one night. It was time to make new ones.

His hands were warm as they skimmed up her sides and over her breasts, rucking up the material of her sweater until she raised her arms so he could pull it off. His eyes raked over her body appreciatively for a long moment before he pulled her close for another kiss, his arms tight and secure around her. Then the world spun wildly in a swirl of green sparks as he rolled them over so that she was lying flat on the bed, pressed into the new silk pillows with Ragnor hovering over her for the second time that night. 

This time there was a smug glint in his dark eyes, and Catarina realized they were pressed entirely skin to skin. 

“Impatient,” she laughed, swatting his shoulder.

He shrugged and grinned at her, completely shameless, which made her laugh again until he cut it off with another kiss.

Catarina wasn’t feeling particularly patient herself. There would be more nights to learn how every familiar part of his body turned new under her hands, but right now she just needed him as close as he could be.

He obliged, covering her body with his. She held him tight against her as they moved together, her fingers tangling in his hair and stroking his back as he murmured strings of endearments like incantations against her neck, the curve of his horns cool where they pressed into her flushed skin while the rain fell outside and the fire died down to embers.

After, she curled up against him, pillowing her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow back down to its normal steady pace. He traced his fingers lazily over her shoulders, soothing spots of tension that Catarina was so used to having, they almost didn’t register anymore, and her heart ached with love she wasn’t sure how to tell him about yet, now that she had finally given herself permission to feel the full force of it.

“We’ll have to tell Magnus,” she said eventually, before the heavy, relaxed feeling in her limbs could pull her under completely.

Ragnor groaned. “Please don’t ever bring up Magnus while we’re naked.”

She muffled her giggles against his skin, and he pulled her in tighter, adjusting the covers more securely around them now that the room was getting chilly.

“Go to sleep,” he said, kissing her temple. “We’ll talk about all of this in the morning.”

She pressed a final kiss to his shoulder and closed her eyes, the nightmares staying far away now that she was warm and safe in the circle of his arms.


End file.
